On Journalistic Ethics: Stalking an Oxymoron?

I probably wouldn’t be telling this story if former SecDef Robert Gates hadn’t told it first, in his memoirs. It happened in 2008. Barack Obama was running for President. In a late summer-I think-interview, I asked Obama if he would keep Gates as SecDef if he won. Obama said he would. Gates was a man I admired immensely: unlike his predecessor Donald Rumsfeld, he really felt the war in Iraq in his gut. He’d brought David Petraeus in to manage it and Petraeus was having an impact. (I had opposed the war, but believed that Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn Rule-you break it, you fix it-applied. We…

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